It occurred to me today that I’m not exactly sure what love is.

It is, in my defense, a word that gets thrown around a lot.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that there is some confusion in my mind about the issue –> between what Disney has put in my head about love and what corporate America has put there, between what I know of love from my parents and what I know about love from my wife, between loving God and loving ice cream, there seems to be a bit of ambiguity.

We use the word a lot; to describe differing emotions –emotions that probably aren’t all ‘love’, technically speaking– to the detriment of the core concept of the word. This is evidenced by the fact that the dictionary definition for the word is multiple paragraphs long. It shouldn’t be so complicated, but it is, since we’ve started using the word to describe the way that we feel about all manner of things.

I love Notre Dame football. I love the way that I feel after a decent run. I love my wife and my children. I love craft beer. I love my parents. Are any of these loves the same as any of the others? Probably not.

No wonder I’m confused.

* * *

I also wonder about tough love –> the concept that you can love someone more or better by forcing them to accept the consequences of their actions, rather than by rescuing them out of those very consequences. I wrote a post about it a couple of months back, you can find it HERE if you’re interested.

Enabling bad behavior is never good, but the psychological need that some people have, to be the hero, will compel them to “come to the rescue”, even when they know that it isn’t the right thing to do.

Whether or not you are actually loving someone by saving them from the situations that they get themselves into is a case to be argued.

When I think about love, in its most-pure form, it includes self-sacrifice and humility. I think, at least on a sub-conscious level, people who rescue their loved ones from bad situations aren’t being selfless or humble. They are feeding a need that they have to be the rescuer. Trust me on this; I know this is true because I am an enabler far too often.

* * *

Do you happen to know who the leading lady is with the most Oscars for that category (Academy Award for Best Actress)?

The answer is Katherine Hepburn. She won the Oscar for best actress four times. No other actress has won the Best Actress Oscar even three times. A whole slew of actresses have won the Oscar in that category twice, including Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Jodie Foster (love her), and Meryl Streep.

In any case, Katherine Hepburn is credited with fifty-three different movie roles, according to the IMDB (the Internet Movie Database). The last role that she had on the Silver Screen was a supporting role in the remake of the 1939 classic, Love Affair. When it was remade in 1994 (the year that I graduated from high school), the starring roles were played by Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

If you are unfamiliar with the basic premise of the movie, two people meet on a fluke and fall in love, but each of them is engaged (unhappily) to someone else. They promise, at the end of their short fling, to reunite after three months’ time, at the top of the Empire State Building. Unfortunately, Terry McKay (played by Annette Bening) is hit by a car while she is at the base of the Empire State Building, trying to make her way to her rendezvous with Mike Gambril (played by Warren Beatty). Since she never arrives, he is left to assume that he has been slighted.

It’s the final scene of this movie that gets me, every. single. time.

—SPOILER ALERT—-

Mike and Terry reconnect, in the final scene of the movie, but Mike doesn’t know that Terry has been incapacitated because of the accident that kept her from the top of the Empire State Building. So, Mike finds Terry, reclined on a couch in her apartment, and he monologues through his feelings about what happened between the two of them, until he finally puts two and two together in his head, and he realizes what ended up happening –and why she has been sitting on the couch the whole time.

I love the end of the movie, but I’m always a little perturbed by the entire concept of the story. Two people meet and fall in love, but then they go their separate ways… for what?!?! While it’s encouraging that Mike and Terry do end up together, I’m not sure that all of the extra drama was necessary. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any Warren Beatty films that I really enjoyed.

It is interesting to note that Warren Beatty and Annette Bening were married at the time that they filmed Love Affair, and are married to this day.

* * *

Jennie and I have been dating for more than twenty-six years. During that time, our understanding of our love for each other has certainly developed through many different phases.

I’ve bought things for her, to try to prove to her that I love her.

I’ve tried to do things for her, to prove to her that I love her.

I’ve repeatedly –probably hundreds of thousands of times– told her how much I love her. I’ve told her with the spoken words, and I’ve told her with the written words.

Whether any of that has been of any use at all, I can certainly say that our love is growing stronger with the passage of time, probably simply because it becomes a more established fact as every day passes.

I know more about my love for my wife than I did ten years ago, just as I hope to know more about my love for my wife in ten years. Since we’ve been married for 7,022 days, you would think that the chances of me having a good sense of how I love her, and why I lover her, would be pretty good.

At this point, though, I think I am most comfortable with saying that I understand more fully how I feel than I used to.

Maybe that’s how it works: a four-year-old really only knows that they love Lucky Charms, while a fourteen-year-old might love their parents or their siblings in a way that they understand.

As time goes by, we come to understand love better, having lived it.